Supporting Aspirations for a More Just Future: Exploring Equity Centered Engineering and Design Practice

Abstract

Design is a process for problem solving and creating artifacts that is leveraged across multiple disciplines and is critical to shaping many facets of society both past and present. As such, designers have immense power in influencing outcomes and opportunities that impact the wellbeing of individuals and communities. Thus, without an intentional focus on equity, design can exacerbate existing harms and reinforce injustices. This dissertation, through three distinct research projects, seeks to investigate ways to prevent or alleviate these injustices by supporting the formation of equity-minded designers and engineers who are prepared to center equity in and through their design work. The first research project investigates the approaches used by transportation practitioners and the barriers they faced when addressing equity through their work. The project used qualitative research methods to elicit detailed descriptions of practitioners’ everyday experiences. Three key findings came out of this work: 1) most practitioners have a desire to address equity, 2) practitioners discussed utilizing 12 distinct approaches to address equity, and 3) practitioners discussed 10 distinct barriers when trying to address equity. Findings suggest that practitioners can use the identified barriers to anticipate and better prepare themselves to face challenges in addressing equity. The second research project identifies external factors that pose as barriers students face when they try to achieve equitable outcomes during curricular and co-curricular community engaged design experiences. To reveal the way these factors operate, the work used critical event narrative methodology and data-driven composite counter storytelling grounded in a critical conceptual model to identify external factors and situate them in four domains of power: interpersonal, curricular, institutional, and hegemonic. The findings are communicated through the creation of a semi-fictional story about a student named Ash, who grapples with achieving equitable outcomes during community engaged design experiences. Findings can support student decision making, and opportunities for educators to increase student agency. The third and last project explores opportunities for asset-based teaching, specifically culturally sustaining pedagogy (CSP), to address and alleviate the violences and harms that equity-minded students of color are subject to and experience during their engineering undergraduate education. By preventing these harms from occurring, equity-minded students can persist through their engineering education and become equity-minded practitioners. This project used an asset-based research approach to collect and analyze qualitative data with 14 undergraduate engineering students of color. Themes from the interviews were coded by their relevance to the five principles of CSP. Findings from the analysis aligned the violences and harms with specific strategies that the principles of CSP suggest to directly connect opportunities for CSP in engineering higher education. Collectively, the three projects suggest that it is necessary to address structural barriers within engineering higher education and design practice in order to support the formation of equity-minded practitioners. The dissertation also demonstrates potential transferability of knowledge, practices, and frameworks across design education and practice, and has broader implications for practitioners, instructors, students, and researchers. Contents of the dissertation can be used by practitioners to integrate shared tools and approaches for addressing equity, by instructors to make transformative changes to their classrooms, by students to find empowerment and validation of their own experiences, and by researchers to inspire future work in the formation of equity-minded practitioners.